Her lips parted, but no words came.He was making fun of her.
The low smolder slid from between her thighs straight to her brain. Ever Trentham had the singular ability to leave her torn between kissing him and cuffing him upside the head.Grabbing the flask from his hand, she took a choking gulp, then dragged her wrist across her mouth, only growing angrier as his smile widened, a one-sided kick of his lips.
“You fascinate me, sprite,” he murmured, amusement threading his voice.
Emotion and reason collided.
He wanted love. What if he found it with someone else? Heartache. Heat. Want.
The pieces of it—of them—struck all at once, scattering faster than she could gather them, and she was on her feet before a minute had passed.
He caught her by the wrist in the doorway and pressed her back against the jamb, more astonished than forceful, as though the moment had outrun him as well. Delight still lingered in his expression, unsettled now, edged with uncertainty and something like disbelief.
A declaration lodged behind her teeth, but he didn’t give her the chance to voice it.
“I’m pouring out my heart at your request, sprite. What more can I do?”
Rough and starved, Isabella rose on her toes and kissed him in reply, her teeth catching his bottom lip as if to pull him fully into it. Which worked. His arms locked around her, fast and hard, hauling her close as the embrace turned reckless, all pressure and breath and the dizzy sense they’d crossed into something neither could retreat from.
He was going to say yes.
When she lowered her hand to touch him this time, he let her.
Groaning, Ever rasped against her lips, “I ask again, you mean to do this?”
Isabella stroked him through his broadcloth trousers as his brow fell to her shoulder. The caress was clumsy,their bodies tangled in a tight press against the door, knees weak (at least hers), breaths broken.
There was no strategy, no skill. Just hunger.
“West wing, second floor. I’m alone in the annex. I’ll leave my bedchamber door unlocked,” he whispered before sending her into the blue of night.
Chapter Eleven
Where a rake stops running.
Time passed with deliberate cruelty.
Ever couldn’t very well rush dinner along by announcing his plans to the assembled guests, not when they were Isabella’s older brothers by marriage as well as his business partners.
Thus the evening unfolded in a typical manner.
Conversation about the state of the country, two bottles of a very respectable Burgundy consumed—he limited himself to one glass so it wouldn’t interfere with later activities—then a meal of buttery roasted chicken and all the trimmings from a cook he’d been amazed to find in the village. This was followed by billiards on an ancient French slate-bed table older than any man playing. When Isabella took the cue and made two impossibly skilled shots, her knowing gaze cutting to him, the countdown began.
A tour of the so-called dungeon camenext. Weston was American and a fool for history, and the cellar dated, impressively even to Ever’s weary mind, to the eleventh century.
All the while, Ever did what he’d done for the past twelve years for the Crown.
He plotted.
Except it wasn’t malicious this time. He was already halfway to being mad about Isabella. Hell, possiblyallthe way. And he’d seen a glimmer in her brown-one-moment, amber-the-next eyes that told him she might be mad about him, too.
He was too old, granted. Too jaded, absolutely. Impoverished, certainly.
But he could fall hard if he shelved his fear and let himself.
And he would be the best, most adoring husband in England. He wanted children, though they hadn’t discussed it. His temper ran even most days. He was loyal to a fault. He listened. If she needed protection, his skill with a knife and pistol was lethal.
Meaning Ever would give her what she wanted—an affair—while knowing he was conspiring to make her fall in love with him. He couldn’t wed otherwise; he simply could not. Pleasure, however, had its uses. Intimacy softened edges. Desire blurred judgment.
